Five Songs from Anna Berkowitz (2002)

Usually when I am asked to write a piece it will take me weeks of research and planning to figure out just what to do or how to begin.  But when Alex Weiser asked me if I would be interested in composing something that would somehow make use of the Yiddish folksong material collected by the ethnomusicologist Ruth Rubin, I knew immediately that I wanted to create arrangements for some of the incredible songs sung by Anna Berkowitz in 1955 and 1961, including “O maminke, maminke” and “Kum aroys tsu mir, mayn libste.”  I forced myself to stick to just five so that the entire set would be of a reasonable length and a young singer who was interested in Yiddish folksong could program them on a student recital.  My goal throughout was to keep the piano arrangements simple and unobtrusive, so that the original melodies and texts could speak for themselves.

Five Songs from Anna Berkowitz was written during a global pandemic, rehearsed and coached over the internet, and premiered in video form on April 21, 2021 by soprano Jardena Gertler-Jaffe and pianist Diana Borshcheva as part of a collaboration between the Graduate Vocal Arts Program at Bard Conservatory and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Thank you to Lorin Sklamberg, Eléonore Biezunski, and The Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings for their phenomenal work in digitizing and maintaining the Ruth Rubin Archive.  Thank you to Lauren Cook and Eve Budnick for looking at early drafts of these songs and offering their suggestions and encouragement.  Thank you to Alex Weiser for creating and curating the Continuing Evolution: Yiddish Folksong in Classical Music series at YIVO and commissioning this piece from me.  And thank you to everyone who has tried to teach me Yiddish over the years: Dovid Braun, Max Edwards, Lillian Shporer-Leavitt, Miriam Trinh, Sheva Zucker, and especially Eliezer Niborski, who first introduced me to the Anna Berkowitz recordings, helped me with my first attempts at transcribing the lyrics, and supplied all of the background information on the texts.

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“Feygele sheyninke” is similar to the Yiddish poem “A Folksmotiv” by Leyb Naydus, who is remembered singing it while accompanying himself on the piano in 1916.  Naydus’s melody survives in print, but is not the same one Anna Berkowitz sings.

“Ikh bin a geyer arum hoyz” is based on Moshe Kulbak’s poem “Ikh bin a bokher a hultay,” the opening poem from his 1922 collection “Naye lider.”  Paula Teitelbaum remembers singing the Kulbak poem onstage (in costume, with a walking stick!) as a little girl in Wroclaw in 1960 to a melody similar to the one here.

“O maminke, maminke” seems to be a variant of the better-known song “Papir is dokh vays,” and it shares some of the text and some of the music with it.

About “Bin ikh mir a meydele a sheyns” I unfortunately know absolutely nothing, but I was struck by how different it sounded from many of the other recordings in the archive, especially since it is in a major key.

“Kum aroys tsu mir, mayn libste” is a translation of a Hebrew poem “Kumi ts’i,” written by Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik in 1905.  There are several musical settings of the Hebrew text, but the origin of the melody Anna Berkowitz sings is unknown.

Text and translations for Five Songs from Anna Berkowitz

Video of the online premiere (Five Songs from Anna Berkowitz is the first set on the program, and each song is preceded by the archival recording; with Jardena Gertler-Jaffe, soprano and Diana Borschcheva, piano)

Video from the 2022 Yiddish Folksong Today festival (Five Songs from Anna Berkowitz is once again the first set on the program; with Jardena Gertler-Jaffe, soprano and Sung-Soo Cho, piano)